Lenovo ThinkPad T16 Gen 1 Review

For the longest time, we were accustomed to counting notebook screens in increments of 14, 15.6, and 17.3 inches. Today, though, the typical intervals are rounded-off and even: 14, 16, and 18 inches. Desktop replacements with 16-inch instead of 15.6-inch displays, dropping the familiar 16:9 for a slightly taller 16:10 aspect ratio, are suddenly everywhere—including Lenovo, where the quintessential business laptop ThinkPad T series has a new 16-inch workhorse. Lenovo's T16 Gen 1 (starts at $1,209.45; $1,899.37 as tested) is a capable productivity partner, but its standard screen is too dark, and its performance doesn't stand out next to its competitors.

When IT Managers Shop at Walmart 

The cheapest ThinkPad T16 at Lenovo.com is $1,209.45 with a 12th Generation Intel Core i5 processor, a modest 8GB of RAM, a 256GB NVMe solid-state drive, and Windows 11 Home. Our test unit, model 21BV0094US, doubles the above memory and storage and features a Core i7-1270P chip (four Performance cores, eight Efficient cores, 16 threads) with Intel's vPro management technology.

(Credit: Kyle Cobian)

This version also includes both a fingerprint reader and face recognition webcam as well as Wi-Fi 6E and Windows 11 Pro. The $1,899.37 price is from Walmart, not the first place you think of for corporate ThinkPads; other retailers sell the laptop for $2,099.

Several 1,920-by-1,200-pixel IPS displays are available for this laptop. Our review unit has the non-touch panel, though there's also a touch screen and one with a built-in privacy filter to foil snooping seatmates on airplanes. A sharper 2,560-by-1,600 screen rated at 600 nits of brightness is the top choice. Sadly, Lenovo puts up neither a 4K nor an OLED option.

(Credit: Kyle Cobian)

Like other ThinkPads, the T16 Gen 1 has passed MIL-STD 810H torture tests against travel hazards like shock, vibration, and extreme temperatures. While its predecessors were crafted mostly from magnesium and aluminum, the T16—available in Thunder Black or Storm Gray—uses those materials in the palm rest but has more plastic in the base and a mix of carbon fiber, plastic, and fiberglass in the lid. I find just a bit of flex if you grasp the screen corners or press the keyboard deck.

The laptop measures 0.81 by 14.3 by 10.1 inches (HWD), a bit bulkier than the 16-inch Acer TravelMate P4 (0.78 by 14.1 by 9.9 inches) and HP EliteBook 865 G9 (0.76 by 14.1 by 9.9 inches) but the same weight as the latter at 3.9 pounds. The T16's screen bezels are a little thicker than is fashionable, with a face recognition webcam featuring a sliding shutter in the top bezel. The power button doubles as a fingerprint reader, giving you two ways to skip typing passwords with Windows Hello.

(Credit: Kyle Cobian)

Two USB-C Thunderbolt 4 ports join Ethernet, HDMI, USB 3.2 Type-A ports, and an audio jack on the laptop's left side. Another USB-A 3.2 port is on the right flank, along with a security-cable locking notch and an optional SmartCard slot. If you often roam beyond the reach of Wi-Fi, 4G LTE mobile broadband is optional via a SIM card slot at the rear. Like many ThinkPads, the T16 lacks a flash-card slot for removable storage.

(Credit: Kyle Cobian)

Several Fine Features, One Large Letdown 

Lenovo's webcam is not only capable of face recognition but 1080p resolution that's a step up from the usual lowball 720p. The camera captures slightly pale but reasonably crisp and colorful images with just a bit of static. 

ThinkPad keyboards rarely disappoint—in fact, with few exceptions they're as high-quality as laptop keyboards get. The T16 Gen 1 is happily no exception, including a handy numeric keypad (it even has dedicated parentheses keys) and real Home, End, Page Up, and Page Down keys instead of shifted cursor arrows. Special top-row keys help place and end conference calls as well as adjust volume and screen brightness. We might quibble that the Fn and Control keys are in each other's place at lower left, but you can swap them with the supplied Lenovo Vantage utility if you like.

(Credit: Kyle Cobian)

The backlit keyboard has a slightly shallow but snappy typing feel, with crisp tactile feedback. Lenovo naturally includes two pointing devices, with its classic TrackPoint mini joystick located at the intersection of the G, H, and B keys and three mouse buttons below the space bar. Below them is a midsized touchpad that glides and taps smoothly, requiring just the right amount of pressure for a hollow but comfortable click. 

Considerably less satisfactory is the T16's standard screen, which looks dim and dingy—it barely achieves its rated 300 nits of brightness in our testing (more later), and we prefer IPS panels to have 400 nits or more—with muted, muddy colors. Contrast produced by the display is decent and viewing angles are reasonably wide, though the screen reflects light and windows at extreme angles, and fine details are fairly sharp. Regardless, this screen is no fun for a full day's work.

(Credit: Kyle Cobian)

Lenovo's top-firing speakers pump out sound that's quite clear, though not all that loud. Bass is minimal here, but you can make out overlapping tracks. Dolby Access software provides dynamic, music, movie, game, and voice presets—the music setting sounds best, while the dynamic one is a bit harsh—and an equalizer. The pre-loaded Lenovo Vantage app combines system settings and updates, microphone focus and noise suppression for conferences, and Wi-Fi security.

Testing the ThinkPad T16 Gen 1: A Five-Way, Full-Size Fight 

For our benchmark charts, we're pitting the ThinkPad T16 against four other 16-inch desktop replacements, led by its abovementioned business-laptop rivals, the HP EliteBook 865 G9 and the more affordable Acer TravelMate P4. The Lenovo ThinkBook 16p Gen 3 targets small rather than enterprise offices. The last spot goes to the HP Envy 16, an Editors' Choice award winner that reminds us consumer laptops cost considerably less than business models in individual pricing—it is $1,809 as tested with a snazzy 4K OLED screen and discrete GPU.

Productivity Tests 

The main benchmark of UL's PCMark 10 simulates a variety of real-world productivity and content-creation workflows to measure overall performance for office-centric tasks such as word processing, spreadsheeting, web browsing, and videoconferencing. We also run PCMark 10's Full System Drive test to assess the load time and throughput of a laptop's storage. 

Three benchmarks focus on the CPU, using all available cores and threads, to rate a PC's suitability for processor-intensive workloads. Maxon's Cinebench R23 uses that company's Cinema 4D engine to render a complex scene, while Primate Labs' Geekbench 5.4 Pro simulates popular apps ranging from PDF rendering and speech recognition to machine learning. Finally, we use the open-source video transcoder HandBrake 1.4 to convert a 12-minute video clip from 4K to 1080p resolution (lower times are better). 

Our final productivity test is Puget Systems' PugetBench for Photoshop, which uses the Creative Cloud version 22 of Adobe's famous image editor to rate a PC's performance for content creation and multimedia applications. It's an automated extension that executes a variety of general and GPU-accelerated Photoshop tasks ranging from opening, rotating, resizing, and saving an image to applying masks, gradient fills, and filters.

The T16 proves itself to be an acceptable performer—it easily clears the 4,000 points that show excellent productivity for apps like Word and Excel in PCMark 10. However, it sadly finishes last in most of our tests. Intel's Core i7-1270P is a 28-watt (W) CPU with fewer cores than the 45W Core i7-12700H; if Lenovo chose it for battery life, it didn't work to beat the competition. Still, the ThinkPad T16 will churn through basic productivity tasks easily…just don't ask it to render a video to a different resolution all that often (you'll wait!), or handle much if any 3D graphics work.

Graphics Tests 

We test Windows PCs' graphics with two DirectX 12 gaming simulations from UL's 3DMark test suite: Night Raid (more modest, suitable for laptops with integrated graphics) and Time Spy (more demanding, suitable for gaming rigs with discrete GPUs).

In addition to that, we run two tests from the cross-platform GPU benchmark GFXBench 5, which stresses both low-level routines like texturing and high-level, game-like image rendering. The 1440p Aztec Ruins and 1080p Car Chase tests, rendered offscreen to accommodate different display resolutions, exercise graphics and compute shaders using the OpenGL programming interface and hardware tessellation respectively. The more frames per second (fps), the better.

The ThinkPad's Intel Iris Xe integrated graphics are suitable only for solitaire and streaming video—even the tepidly received ThinkBook 16P Gen 3 runs laps around its cousin here, thanks to a dedicated GPU. While Lenovo makes a 2GB Nvidia GeForce MX550 GPU optional here, even that will fall far short of a game-worthy graphics adapter, like the GeForce RTX 3060 in the Envy and ThinkBook.

Battery and Display Tests 

We test laptops' battery life by playing a locally stored 720p video file (the open-source Blender movie Tears of Steel(Opens in a new window)) with display brightness at 50% and audio volume at 100%. We make sure the battery is fully charged before the test, with Wi-Fi and keyboard backlighting turned off. 

For additional display testing, we use Datacolor SpyderX Elite monitor calibration sensor and its Windows software to measure a laptop screen's color saturation—what percentage of the sRGB, Adobe RGB, and DCI-P3 color gamuts or palettes the display can show—and its 50% and peak brightness in nits (candelas per square meter).

Ten hours of unplugged life is enough to see you through a workday, plus a bit of after-hours web surfing or media streaming, but it's unimpressive by today's standards, and it's a figure that's still well short of the two HP models and the Acer. The ThinkPad T16's screen also joined the TravelMate's as the dimmest and least colorful in the group, with the Envy 16's OLED display leading the way.

Verdict: A Moderate ThinkPad Misfire

At roughly two thousand dollars, the T16 Gen 1 isn't cheap (though most business laptops are bought in discounted bulk deals), and while Lenovo's ThinkPad build and keyboard quality lift its rating, it's not in Editors' Choice contention. This Lenovo includes plenty of ports and adequate performance, but faster desktop replacements with superior screens are readily available.